Pandemic's issues

Hi,
I have a bit problem with the new talent Pandemic. As the tooltip says you can re-dot your applied dot and you mantain its effect and adds up to 50% of its time. Well, my question is related to multidotting: when is the best time to redot? I consider this but don't know if it's good:

- Opening: SB+SS and Re-dotting: BA, Corr and UA
- On combat: When my dot's are about it's 50%, re-dott.

It's still ideal really to clip before the last tick where possible, Pandemic however allows you to make better use of Haunt by clipping that bit early to ensure the full duration of the Haunt debuff can be covered by solid MG channeling. For example if you have 15s on UA, 20s on Agony and 7s on Corruption, you can refresh Corruption for no loss, pop Haunt, then channel MG through until UA is virtually at it's final tick.

To be more specific you can refresh your dots at any point below their 50% original time. For me it is 7s for UA, 9s for Corruption, and 12sec for Agony. Now as Jessicka has said, it is ideal to refresh them on their last tick to ensure more dps, but pandemic was added for more of a quality of life reason with MG and DS.

You want 100% up time on your DoTs while spending as little time actually casting them as possible, leaving it until the very last moment does this. Letting it drop off means more time between the last tick of the previous DoT and the first tick of the next, while refreshing it early cuts off ticks you'd already spent the time to benefit from. Think of time is a resource for a global capped spec, and clipping wastes it.

I don't see the "last tick" optimization thing either - if anything, you want to cast as soon as possible after MG or Haunt drops to let you get as much Malefic Grasp uptime as possible.

Isn't that a round about way of saying what I did in my first reply? Basically if it's going to benefit your Haunt/MG overlap, then clip. Otherwise the rotation could literally be a castsequence macro that went: 'CoA, Corr, UA, Haunt, MG MG MG, Corr, UA, Haunt, MG, MG, MG, CoA, Corr, UA, Haunt, MG...' ad nauseum until the execute. I don't think that's optimal.

You want 100% up time on your DoTs while spending as little time actually casting them as possible, leaving it until the very last moment does this. Letting it drop off means more time between the last tick of the previous DoT and the first tick of the next, while refreshing it early cuts off ticks you'd already spent the time to benefit from. Think of time is a resource for a global capped spec, and clipping wastes it.

Except that's not true.

You don't spend more time casting DoTs if you refresh within the last half duration as opposed to before the last tick. Pandemic makes it so that if you refresh within the last half of the base duration that time is added onto the refreshed time (which is exactly how refreshing works with DoTs normally before the last tick).

You spend exactly the same amount of GCDs casting dots if you refresh with 5 seconds left as you do with 1 second left. Pandemic basically makes refreshing DoTs piss-easy but it allows us to abuse when we refresh to gain more uptime on Malefic Grasp while under the effects of Haunt.

You want to refresh your dots any time between 1/2 of the base cast time and just before it falls off (Corr=0s-9s, UA=0s-7s, Agony=0s-12s) at no DPS loss. Pandemic is a QOL change so that when we have to refresh 1 dot, it is likely we can refresh others, and therefore interrupt MG less often.

It used to be that we had a 2-3s window (between the 2nd to last, and last tick) to refresh expiring dots in order to not lose dps.

Now, we have 7-12s windows, which will overlap, allowing us to break channeling, apply 2-3 dots, and then go back to longer channels, as compared to breaking channels more often to refresh dots, giving shorter periods of channeling.

You want to refresh your dots any time between 1/2 of the base cast time and just before it falls off (Corr=0s-9s, UA=0s-7s, Agony=0s-12s) at no DPS loss. Pandemic is a QOL change so that when we have to refresh 1 dot, it is likely we can refresh others, and therefore interrupt MG less often.

It used to be that we had a 2-3s window (between the 2nd to last, and last tick) to refresh expiring dots in order to not lose dps.

Now, we have 7-12s windows, which will overlap, allowing us to break channeling, apply 2-3 dots, and then go back to longer channels, as compared to breaking channels more often to refresh dots, giving shorter periods of channeling.

That is,"if=ticks_remain<add_ticks%2" translates to "just refresh it when it's under %50 remaining". Also note, due to UA's cast time, you can start this a little earlier, as reflected in the following conditional in SimCraft:

As I can see SimC clips MG, so is it, for human, more beneficial to clip it or not, with pandemic in mind?

And to add, if you have just enough haste, to get your dot at threshold (23sec for agony) where it is just about to gain extra tick, then you need to refresh it, at most 11.5 seconds (not 12 seconds for agony) before it expires in order to not waste that one tick. Then there is problem when dots have odd number of ticks, how many will be added when it is refreshed? All in all it is better to let dot run a bit more then half its duration before you refresh it.

do we still refresh at 15 or is it 30 sec cause of Pandemic I'm not sure and cant find any answers via google searching

If doom has a 60sec duration without being refreshed first, then you can refresh anywhere when it has less than 30 seconds remaining.

Originally Posted by randa

As I can see SimC clips MG, so is it, for human, more beneficial to clip it or not, with pandemic in mind?

And to add, if you have just enough haste, to get your dot at threshold (23sec for agony) where it is just about to gain extra tick, then you need to refresh it, at most 11.5 seconds (not 12 seconds for agony) before it expires in order to not waste that one tick. Then there is problem when dots have odd number of ticks, how many will be added when it is refreshed? All in all it is better to let dot run a bit more then half its duration before you refresh it.

Clip for other spells? Yes.
For MG clipping itself, it can't happen. It just refreshes like a DoT would and you lose nothing.

If you have a 23 second agony then you can refresh anywhere after 11.5 seconds. The ticks for the new DoT are added after the next tick of the current dot, and then the extra time on the original DoT that wasn't used is tacked onto the end (or the beginning if you want to think of it that way).

You can think of it like this, | represents a tick, and - represents just a measure of time in 0.5 seconds (so 2 ticks is 1 second of time). A ^ represents a cast of the DoT. This hypothetical dot has a duration of 9 seconds and ticks every 3 seconds (or 3 - marks)

^-----|-----|-----|

That's the normal dot with a duration of 9 seconds. Now say we recast somewhere in the last 50% of the duration

^-----|---^-|-----|-----|-----|-----|

You refresh after 50% of the original DoTs gone through and it's exactly the same as having refreshed anywhere else in the last 50% of the original DoT.

Pandemic essentially extends the amount of time we can refresh DoTs without any change in how DoT refreshing mechanics work.

2.) Before you haunt, make sure there is ~9 Seconds left on all of your dots so that you can channel Malefic Grasp for the full duration of Haunt.

3.) If you have to choose which to refresh first (say they are all going to fall off at the same time) you always refresh Agony first. Never. Ever. Ever. Let Agony fall off.

---------- Post added 2012-10-05 at 09:35 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Brusalk

^-----|-----|-----|

That's the normal dot with a duration of 9 seconds. Now say we recast somewhere in the last 50% of the duration

^-----|---^-|-----|-----|-----|-----|

You refresh after 50% of the original DoTs gone through and it's exactly the same as having refreshed anywhere else in the last 50% of the original DoT.

Pandemic essentially extends the amount of time we can refresh DoTs without any change in how DoT refreshing mechanics work.

Malefic Grasp behaves this way as well. If you refresh the MG before the chanenl finishes, you don't "lose" any ticks of MG. I suggest downloading Gnosis and setting the cast bar up to show the tickpoints of Malefic Grasp - it even updates your second channel to properly reflect how many ticks you get if you refreshed early on the first channel.